by Bill Bryson
FORBIDDEN FRUITS
Alice Temperley
on cider farms
THEY ARE, FOR MANY, an integral part of our farming heritage. But our nation’s cider farms and cider makers are not what they used to be. Growing up on a cider farm, we were taught from a young age to mourn the grubbing of an orchard. And I have done a lot of mourning since. In the past fifty years some fifty per cent of Somerset’s orchards have now disappeared. And the once-familiar names of cider apples such as Brown snout, Chisel jersey and Kingston black sound ever more archaic.
It is perhaps because of their rapid demise that cider farms are now, for me, rather melancholic places. But it wasn’t always that way. The autumns of my childhood were dominated by the hum of the apple press and the smell of fermenting apples. On frosty mornings I would accompany my father to help fork pomace (crushed apple remnants) to the orchard’s sheep.
Each autumnal apple harvest brought with it a wonderful sense of community. I will always remember the motley crew of apple pressers that would arrive before the first light around harvest time. At dawn – on especially cold days – I was in charge of taking this weather-worn team fried breakfasts. I always enjoyed their bawdy camaraderie as they watched the sun rise over the mountains of apples piled in the yard.
In the orchard I was never alone. A notoriously fearsome pig called Ginger made a home among the apple trees. A bristling orange-and-black chicken-hunting monster, she was a worthy pig to taunt. She was, however, a force to be reckoned with, and her infamous jaws were avoided only by mad dashes around nearby tree trunks. When the pig alone didn’t provide enough excitement, we would brave her in plastic cider barrels, which we would clamber into before rolling down the orchard.
Of course, we would inevitably hit a tree, scramble out, and embark on the life-and-death, tree-to-tree gauntlet before making it back to safe ground. Sadly, although the source of much enjoyment, Ginger the pig progressed from hunting and killing chickens to lambs and, after a stab at my mother’s ankles, was banished to the freezer before she developed a taste for small children.
By preserving my memories, cider farms – with their vibrant apple trees – will remain the foundation from which I view the English countryside. They represent my childhood; I know and understand them. And, with any luck, they will continue to be an archetypal – albeit faded – vision of England in which I, too, can bring up my children.
POETRY IN MOTION
Nigel Thompson
on mist
A COUNTRYSIDE WITHOUT MIST is like a play without drama; a poem without emotion. Poet and author Edgar Allan Poe once said, ‘Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the mist”.’ I think he was right. As summer fades and the backdrop changes – swallows migrate from their telegraph wires and trees are drained of colour – it is the mist that clings to life and provides atmosphere. It is this shroud of liquid droplets suspended in the air that turns a rolling hillside scene into a work of art.
It is not so much the science of mist that fascinates me. It is the way it transforms a landscape as it descends. Mist is like a universal corrector in the way it veils the imperfections of the middle ground. It softens sharp edges and disguises the influence of man – it puts nature on show. I remember visiting the Lake District one October and seeing the mist linger over Grasmere. The hills stood tall above this blanket of air and the water crept out from beneath. It was like watching an artist put the finishing touches to an oil painting right before my eyes.
My life is one that has been spent close to water – I used to live in a water mill in the Lambourn Valley and now enjoy the view of a chalk stream near my home in Wiltshire – and it would be hard for me to imagine a world without mist. For twelve years I laboured over the vineyard on my land here in Stitchcombe, rising in the early autumn mornings to tend the vines and watch the grapes ripen. And it was on those mornings that I grew to love mist and all its mysteries. There is something about morning mist that is particularly compelling. I love watching it flow like a stream in the air; I love being enveloped in it along with thousands of dew-covered spider webs, protected from the weak shafts of light trying hard to make an impression on the scene. And I love breaking through it like the spires and tall trees on the horizon, and seeing it rest like a blanket of cotton wool before me.
Whether it is clinging to the contours of a hill or patching up a scene with its artistic strokes, the transient beauty of mist is something that has inspired generations of artists. with its unpredictable nature and dramatic undulations it brings romance and personality to the landscape, turning words on a page into an evocative scene. Keats’ autumn was a ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. For Wordsworth in ‘Resolution and Independence’, the mist took on a life of its own, chasing a hare in the glittering sun and running ‘with her all the way, wherever she doth run’. With mist, characters from literature are lost, hidden and enveloped but always remembered.
A countryside without mist is a countryside without art. Far from the glare of city lights and tightly packed buildings, mist will continue to spend autumn days perfecting its rural masterpiece – before the evening blanket descends to rub it all away.
THIS LAND OF DREAMING SPIRES
Simon Thurley
on spires
BOARDING A TRAIN AT London’s King’s Cross station and pounding up the East Coast Main Line, through York and Newcastle towards Edinburgh, is one of the great railway journeys of the world. Before your eyes – and from the comfort of your seat – passes some of our nation’s greatest heritage. The cathedrals of Peterborough, York and Durham would make the line magical in themselves, but these are just three high points on a journey filled with historical delight and fascination.
I don’t imagine many people notice the tall stone spire that lies eastwards across a water meadow just before the train races through Huntingdon. It belongs to St Mary’s Church, Godmanchester, the parish church of the small town where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. How could the builders of that noble spire have guessed that half a millennium after it was completed, one of the town’s sons would glimpse their work while travelling at the unimaginable speed of 125 miles per hour? How pleased would they have felt that their construction was still serving its original purpose?
Of course, we don’t know the definitive reason why people started building spires on the towers of their churches. A spire certainly points upwards to God, so that may be the reason; but it is equally likely to have been driven by engineering. Medieval engineers were inventive and ambitious, and when it became possible to build something unusual and complicated, they did so with gusto. Above all, though, a spire must have been a marker – a way of identifying a place both geographically and economically.
Back on the East Coast Main Line, think of the spires of Newark and Grantham. They are small towns today, and it’s nice to know where they are, but why such extraordinary spires? These were towns on the Great North Road, the artery linking London and Edinburgh. These prosperous little places were vying with each other for the trade of travellers. Their spires reached higher than those in neighbouring towns, like children in a classroom raising their hands higher in the hope the teacher will notice them first. These spires of England are the exclamation marks of our countryside, punctuation that not only tells you where you are, but helps you gauge the former economic condition and self-regard of a place.
Salisbury Cathedral now has the tallest spire in England (its great rival had been Old St Paul’s in London, which lost its spire to a bolt of lightning during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and was then destroyed in the Great Fire of London of 1666). But what others lack in height, they make up for in number – Lichfield, for instance, with its three spires, is unique. But, for me, these competitions in spire envy are less interesting and beautiful than the village spires seen half-shrouded in mist, set against a sunset or behind a flock of emigrating
swallows, or glimpsed rising above a leafy tree canopy or against a filigree of bare branches and twigs. Rarely in the history of architecture have man and nature conspired to produce so much beauty.
HEAVEN IN A WILD FLOWER
Alan Titchmarsh
on England’s flora
THERE IS A DAY in late spring or early summer when, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows, I am forced out of the house by some deep-seated animal instinct. I can no longer sit at my desk attempting to weave a modest kind of magic with words. I must escape into the countryside and be a part of it.
I live in an old farmhouse surrounded by fields and woods, copses and hedgerows, meadows and hawthorncanopied bridleways, so it takes only a few minutes before I am wading through wild flowers, listening to birdsong. I know some of the birds by name – quite a lot of them, I suppose – but I am especially familiar with the flowers. It is somehow more satisfying. Birds are busy, demanding to be noticed, capable of arousing curiosity in even the most indolent of passers-by. But flowers make no fuss, except in the exuberance of their blossom, and some of them do even that with commendable reserve. The moschatel, the symbol of Christian watchfulness, is barely three inches high with five lime-green flowers that look north, south, east, west and upwards in the direction of heaven; dog’s mercury – hardly a flower at all, just a modest green tassel – indicates that a particular patch of woodland has been in existence since the Middle Ages. And by the river, the bashful, nodding water avens rests with its round-shouldered blooms of burnished copper that never dare to look you in the eye.
I love their names – lady’s bedstraw and red campion, Queen Anne’s lace and herb Paris – each one a link with countrymen of the past, who gave them their strangesounding monikers. Schooled in botanical Latin, I know them also as Paris quadrifolia and Arum maculatum. But it is the mystery bound up in their common names that soothes me now.
I’ll find a spot by the hedgebank that borders a field just above our house where I can sit in the warm, sweet cocksfoot grass and look down on the pantiled roof. I’ll see the surface of our pond glinting, bright as a diamond in the morning sun. Swallows will skim it, skilfully slaking their thirst on the wing; the distant whistle of a steam train on the Watercress Line will take me back to my childhood in the Yorkshire Dales, where Mum and I went off in search of wild flowers.
I still have those wild flowers, pressed flat in a rough album – their names added in a spidery scrawl courtesy of nine-year-old fingers and a first Platinum fountain pen. Underneath the tissue paper removed from our daily loaf of bread, they are held fast in their desiccated glory evergreen alkanet, fox and cubs, and wood sorrel – each one a memory of a moment in the summer of 1958 when they were plucked from Middleton Woods or the banks of the river Wharfe. Once home, they’d be sandwiched between the pages of the Ilkley Gazette before being slipped under the rag rug that ran from the kitchen to the living room, where the family feet could press them flat within a week.
It is fifty years now since the names of these flowers became as familiar to me as my own. They are a stirring reminder of a time when life was beginning to reveal its riches, its joys, its complexities and its heartbreaks. Crisp and lifeless they are now, and yet within them is captured a moment in childhood – an awakening to the wonders of nature. English wild flowers continue to captivate me more than any exotic species. They belong to my neck of the woods, my childhood, my life. Nodding in the hedgerow, blowing in the meadows and dipping their toes into the river, they enchanted a small boy to whom nature seemed more straightforward than people. In so many ways, it still does.
ALONE ON THE MOORS
Mark Tully
on moorland
CHESHIRE IS AN UNDERRATED county, often dismissed as nothing more than a posh dormitory for the two great cities of Manchester and Liverpool. But, as a child, it was home to me and my five siblings, after my parents brought us back from India, where we were born. And I came to love it dearly.
The countryside, with its lush green fields grazed by shorthorn cattle, its farmhouses and smart, manicured villages, is comforting and domesticated. Where we lived was also, like most of Cheshire, flat. So it’s not surprising I was excited when we started the climb from the town of Macclesfield – once famous for its silk – up to the moors on the Cheshire-Derbyshire border to picnic.
The moors were wild, untamed and sparsely populated the opposite of our home countryside. Instead of cows contentedly chewing grass, sheep nibbled coarse turf. Heather, a deep purple in season, covered much of the landscape, and weather-beaten grey stone walls, which seemed to have come from a different age, straggled across the hillsides. As we climbed up to the Cat and Fiddle – said to be the highest pub in England – we would often drive into a thin mist.
Wherever they are in England, moors still excite me. They have the primeval quality of mountains and the sea. In the same way, they convey a sense of the grandeur of nature, so much greater than anything we humans have created. The quality of the moors, however, which differentiates them from other places of breathtaking natural beauty, is their bleakness. It’s a humbling bleakness, which often gives me a feeling of being small and insignificant.
Our moors are wild, empty places. Shakespeare’s King Lear railed against ‘filial ingratitude’ on a wild heath, while Macbeth met the witches on a blasted one. It was the wildness of the Yorkshire moors that inspired Emily Brontë to create one of the most disturbed and disturbing characters of English literature, Heathcliff. And The Hound of the Baskervilles – the Sherlock Holmes adventure that terrified me when I read it as a child – is set on Dartmoor.
Looking out on the moors, I see a world without boundaries. Open like the sea, they seem to go on for ever. And in a small and crowded country like England, I find this openness particularly precious and awe-inspiring. It reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, ‘The Grandeur of God’. For him, such grandeur was not frightening. He saw in it evidence that the ‘Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with bright breast and ah! bright wings.’ I and many others also find that the grandeur of God does, in Hopkins’ words, ‘flame out’ in nature. It flames out in places where we humans have intervened least; places we have allowed to remain close to nature; places like the English moors. So long may they remain bleak, wild, empty and open.
TAKING FLIGHT
Charlie Waite
on wartime airfields
MY FATHER, REX WAITE, never told me very much about what he did in the war. Perhaps he knew that I would not take it in. He was middle-aged when I was born and so was a rather distant figure throughout my childhood, but one of whom I am immensely proud. The crowning achievement of his career was his brainchild, Berlin Airlift, a way of getting food and fuel to Western-occupied sectors of Berlin. An award for charity is given in his name at RAF Cranwell Training College each year – he was in the first intake in 1918. That’s why, when I think of England’s strengths as a nation, I think not only of its beautiful landscape, but also of its people and its history – my father and the airfields of Lincolnshire.
Travelling up to Lincolnshire on a blustery January day, it was impossible not to be struck by the light – a result of the flat fields and vast sky that made the county perfect for the many airfields built here in the lead-up to the Second World War. I found it quite hard to pin down an exact figure for the number operational in Lincolnshire throughout the war. But of those that were used, I believe only four remain. What seems obvious from this is not only how important Lincolnshire was in maintaining our defences, but also how the end of the war and the demands of modern warfare forced the county’s landscape to adapt.
I was lucky enough to get fine weather on my visit. But as you drive on to the disused concrete runway at RAF Metheringham, it is not hard to imagine the thoughts of young pilots setting off on dangerous night missions to face enemy fighters and frostbite. This land was perfect for runways, but attracted fog. And for a pilot, exhausted and strained to breaking point, the appalling vis
ibility must have required a superhuman effort.
Apart from the memorial to the Dam Busters at Woodhall Spa, I was surprised to find only a few reminders of the past. There are a small number of roadside plaques, names engraved on the flecked granite; there is an image of a Lancaster bomber painted on to a swinging village sign, and the walls of a pub covered entirely with photographs of smiling faces with their planes. And on a trip from airfield to airfield, it is just the odd spot of grass-fringed, fractured concrete that betrays signs of each one’s turbulent history.
There seemed to be little left of my icon. But perhaps it is this physical lack of evidence that, in some paradoxical way, speaks volumes about Lincolnshire’s recent past. The overgrown grass may disguise its scars, but the passing of some sixty-five years does little to drown out the voices of a thousand crews and the deep grumble of their bombers still hanging in the Lincolnshire air.
In fact, one visit to RAF Cranwell is enough for me to see that my icon is not just a patch of land carved out of the countryside. It is an icon of many faces. When I think of these disused airfields, I think of the young pilots who have passed, and continue to pass, through its doors. I think of the photograph of my father that hangs on the wall there – his face looking out from the ‘Class of 1920’. I think of the Lancaster itself and the inventors, aviators and servicemen who have helped shape and defend this delightful country. Without such inspirational people, the countryside would be a lonely place.
THE DAWN CHORUS
